DEFINING JURISPRUDENCE

INTRODUCTION
BENTHAM once described jurisprudence as the art of being methodically ignorant of what
everybody knows.1 The gibe loses some of its sharpness when we remember that it is
perhaps better to be methodically ignorant than to be unmethodically learned. What puzzles
one in the epigram is the confident assumption of what everybody knows; for if, as
Bentham avers, everybody knows what jurisprudence is about, nobody seems to know
exactly what it is.
Some of the most famous descriptions of it seem to state either too little or too much. When,
for example, Ulpian, and Justinian after him, tell us that it is the observation of things
human and divine, the knowledge of the just and the unjust, we feel that the definition might
equally well apply to religion or philosophy. And some comparatively modern definitions
seem to be hardly less vague-for example, that of Sheldon Amos: The Science of
Jurisprudence may be said, broadly, to deal with the necessary and formal facts expressed in
the very structure of civil society, as that structure is modified and controlled by the facts of
civil government and of the constitution of human nature and of the physical universe. 2 The
very term "jurisprudence," as denoting a separate branch of study, is not very ancient in our
law. Austin was the first scholar who attempted to prescribe an exact scope for it; and it is a
little discouraging to find that, though he devotes much effort to determining its province, he
never throughout the whole of his voluminous work attempts to define it, except by telling us
what it is not-and chiefly he tells us that it is not moral philosophy. It is impossible, and it
would be unprofitable, to collate the many experimental definitions of jurisprudence.
Broadly speaking, they suggest three distinct conceptions of jurisprudence-as a science, as a
philosophy, and as a method.
1 John Frost Dillon, Benthams Influences in the Reforms of the Nineteenth Century, The Online
Library of Liberty,http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php
%3Ftitle=2081&chapter=158278&layout=html&Itemid=27 (Retrieved on 24/10/2013).
2Sheldon Amos, A Systematic View of the Science of Jurisprudence, [London: Longmans Green &
Co., 2005] at p. 239.
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OBJECTIVES
1. To analyse the definitions of jurisprudence as per the existing schools of thought.
2. To discuss how far the jurists have been successful in defining jurisprudence.

SOURCES OF DATA
For the purpose of project the student has relied on secondary sources to hunt for information
relating to the topic. Secondary sources include textbooks, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, law
reviews, etc.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The research methodology for the project work is doctrinal i.e., library based research. The
researcher has employed this methodology as doctrinal research deals with what the law is on
a particular issue. It is concerned with analysis of the legal doctrine and how it has been
developed and applied. In case of doctrinal research the sources of data are legal and
appellate court decisions.

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MEANING AND CONCEPT OF JURISPRUDENCE

Etymology
The Latin word juris is the genitive form of jus meaning "law." So, juris means "of law" or
"legal." Prudentia, meaning "knowledge" in Latin, translates into English as "prudence." The
native English word is "wisdom," which originally also meant "knowledge."
History of jurisprudence
Jurisprudence already had this meaning in Ancient Rome, even if at its origins the discipline
was a monopoly of the College of Pontiffs (Pontifex), which retained an exclusive power of
judgment on facts, being the only experts (periti) in the jus of traditional law (mos maiorum,
a body of oral laws and customs verbally transmitted "by father to son"). 3 Pontiffs indirectly
created a body of laws by their pronunciations on single concrete (judicial) cases.
Their sentences were supposed to be simple interpretations of the traditional customs, but
effectively it was an activity that, apart from formally reconsidering for each case what
precisely was traditionally in the legal habits, soon turned also to a more equitative
interpretation, coherently adapting the law to the newer social instances. The law was then
implemented with new evolutive Institutions (legal concepts), while remaining in the
traditional scheme. Pontiffs were replaced in 3rd century BC by a laical body of prudentes. 4
Admission to this body was conditional upon proof of competence or experience.
Under the Roman Republic, schools of law were created, and the activity constantly became
more academic. In the age from the early Roman Empire to the 3rd century, a relevant
literature was produced by some notable groups including the Proculians and Sabinians. The
degree of scientific depth of the studies was unprecedented in ancient times and reached still
unrivalled peaks of skill. It is about this activity that it has been said that Romans had
developed an art out of the law.
After the 3rd century, Jurisprudentia became a more bureaucratic activity, with few notable
authors. It was during the Byzantine Empire (5th century) that legal studies were once again
3 Sir Henry Sumner James Maine, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the History of Early Society, at
p. 11.
4 http://neohumanism.org/j/ju/jurisprudence.html (Retrieved on 24/10/2013).
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undertaken in depth, and it is from this cultural movement that Justinian's Corpus Juris
Civilis was born.5
Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. In 1880 Sir Thomas Erskine Holland
offered the first English definition which at least had the merit of being succinct. 6 His sixword formula is well known: "The formal science of positive law." It is the weakness of all
definitions that they substitute one conception for another, and the substitute often needs as
much definition as that for which it is substituted. The explanation has to be explained.
Holland's compact definition is not altogether free from the common infirmity of its kind.
What, we immediately ask, is a formal science?
The author explains-what is certainly not self-explanatory -that by the term "formal" he
means that jurisprudence concerns the human relations which are governed by rules of law
rather than the material rules themselves; for these latter are the subjects of legal exposition,
criticism, or compilation rather than of jurisprudence.
Inevitably, we next inquire what is meant by positive law? Holland employs the word in
the same sense as Austin. It is actual, existing law, as distinguished from hypothetical, ideal
law. Therefore Holland insists at the outset-and remains faithful to his principle-that
jurisprudence must work a posteriori and not a priori.
This is consistent with-and indeed dictated by-the conception of jurisprudence as a science
rather than as a philosophy. Can there be a science of law in any intelligible sense of the word
"science "?
A science is a system of knowledge. The mere accumulation of knowledge is valueless by
itself, except, of course, as a kind of manual labour which may provide the material for
constructive intelligence. There is no greater ignoramus than the man who knows everything
and understands nothing-and such persons abound. Information is barren until it is brought
systematically into relationship with some part of the general meaning of existence.
The object of a science is "to reach the highest point of a generalisation founded upon
acquaintance with phenomena, consequently upon that relative knowledge which is the
subject of the special sciences." Its method is inductive. It begins with the observation
of separate things, events, phenomena, and, bringing them into a rational concatenation,
arrives at some general principle which they exhibit. It is not creative: its material is beyond
5 Ibid.
6 42 Juridical. Review 275 1930.
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its own choice or control. It takes the "things given" to it-its data-and tries to discover the
animating principle within. Instead of deducing a principle of ought from an ideal which is
assumed ab ante, it induces a principle of is from what is observed and correlated. If
jurisprudence is inductive in this sense, or, as Holland puts it, a posteriori, clearly it is at once
distinguished from morals.7
It may therefore sound contradictory to say, as we are bound to say, that if it is a science at
all, it is one of the moral sciences. It is needless to observe that the term "moral" in this
connection is used in a conventional sense, which is opposed to the "physical." The physical
sciences deal with things and forces of the macrocosm which is outside the microcosm-the
"little kingdom"-of man himself. Jurisprudence does not deal with the facts and forces of the
physical universe, but with certain manifestations of man's reason and consciousness. It is
systematised investigation, not of the manner in which man is affected by physical
environment, but of the ways which he has devised for regulating his relationships in society.
Finally, science is general and it is uniform. There is no such thing as a science which is
local. Locality may greatly affect the conditions in which science has to work, it may colour
some parts of its data, but it cannot in itself affect a principle of knowledge. This is so selfevident that it would scarcely bear assertion were it not that it seems to be ignored in certain
controversies as to the terminology of jurisprudence.
It is said that there cannot be any such thing as a general science of law which holds good, as
a system of knowledge, with any real uniformity and universality.

7 Ibid.
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JURISPRUDENCE AS PER VARIOUS SCHOOLS OF LAW

Natural law
Natural law theory asserts that there are laws that are immanent in nature, to which enacted
laws should correspond as closely as possible. This view is frequently summarised by the
maxim an unjust law is not a true law, in which 'unjust' is defined as contrary to natural law.
8

Natural law is closely associated with morality and, in historically influential versions, with

the intentions of God. To oversimplify its concepts somewhat, natural law theory attempts to
identify a moral compass to guide the lawmaking power of the state. Notions of an objective
moral order, external to human legal systems, underlie natural law. What is right or wrong
can vary according to the interests one is focused upon. Natural law is sometimes identified
with the slogan that "an unjust law is no law at all", but as John Finnis, the most important of
modern natural lawyers has argued, this slogan is a poor guide to the classical
Thomist position.
Aristotle
Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law. Like his philosophical
forefathers, Socrates and Plato, Aristotle posited the existence of natural justice or natural
right. His association with natural law is due largely to the interpretation given to him
by Thomas Aquinas. This was based on Aquinas' conflation of natural law and natural right,
the latter of which Aristotle posits in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics Aquinas' influence
was such as to affect a number of early translations of these passages, though more recent
translations render them more literally.
Aristotle notes that natural justice is a species of political justice, viz. the scheme
of distributive and corrective justice that would be established under the best political
community; were this to take the form of law, this could be called a natural law, though
Aristotle does not discuss this and suggests in the Politics that the best regime may not rule
by law at all.
The best evidence of Aristotle's having thought there was a natural law comes from
the Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the "particular" laws that each people has
set up for itself, there is a "common" law that is according to nature. The context of this
8 http://www.academia.edu/4408954/School_of_Laws_in_Modern_Western_Law (Retrieved on
24/10/2013).
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remark, however, suggests only that Aristotle advised that it could be rhetorically
advantageous to appeal to such a law, especially when the "particular" law of ones' own city
was averse to the case being made, not that there actually was such a law; Aristotle,
moreover, considered two of the three candidates for a universally valid, natural law provided
in this passage to be wrong. Aristotle's theoretical paternity of the natural law tradition is
consequently disputed.
Sharia
Sharia refers to the body of Islamic law. The term means "way" or "path"; it is the legal
framework within which public and some private aspects of life are regulated for those living
in a legal system based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence.9 Fiqh is the term for Islamic
jurisprudence, made up of the rulings of Islamic jurists. A component of Islamic studies, Fiqh
expounds the methodology by which Islamic law is derived from primary and secondary
sources.
Mainstream Islam distinguishes fiqh, which means understanding details and inferences
drawn by scholars, from sharia that refers to principles that lie behind the fiqh. Scholars hope
that fiqh and sharia are in harmony in any given case, but they cannot be sure.
Thomas Aquinas
Saint Thomas Aquinas [Thomas of Aquin, or Aquino] (c. 1225 7 March 1274) was
a philosopher and theologian in the scholastic tradition, known as "Doctor Angelicus, Doctor
Universal is". He is the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the
Thomistic school of philosophy, which was a long the primary philosophical approach of
the Roman Catholic Church. The work for which he is best-known is the Summa
Theological. One of the thirty-three Doctors of the Church, he is considered by many
Catholics to be the Church's greatest theologian. Consequently, many institutions of learning
have been named after him.
Aquinas distinguished four kinds of law. These are the eternal, natural, human, and divine
law. Eternal law is the decree of God which governs all creation. Natural law is the human
"participation" in the eternal law and is discovered by reason. Natural law, of course, is based
on "first principles":
. . . this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be
avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this . . .
9 M. Kabir Hassan, Mervyn K. Lewis, Handbook of Islamic Banking, [U.S.A: Elgar Original
Reference, 2006] at p. 232.
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The desire to live and to procreate are counted by Aquinas among those basic (natural)
human values on which all human values are based. Human law is positive law: the natural
law applied by governments to societies. Divine law is the specially revealed law in
the scriptures.
Thomas Hobbes
In his treatise Leviathan, (1651), Hobbes expresses a view of natural law as a precept, or
general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive
of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he
thinks it may best be preserved. Hobbes was a social contractarian and believed that the law
gained peoples' tacit consent. He believed that society was formed from a state of nature to
protect people from the state of war between mankind that exists otherwise. Life is, without
an ordered society, "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short". It is commonly commented that
Hobbes' views about the core of human nature were influenced by his times. The English
Civil War and the Cromwellian dictatorship had taken place, and he felt absolute authority
vested in a monarch, whose subjects obeyed the law, was the basis of a civilized society.
Lon Fuller
Writing after World War II, Lon L. Fuller notably emphasised that the law must meet certain
formal requirements (such as being impartial and publicly knowable). To the extent that an
institutional system of social control falls short of these requirements, Fuller argues, we are
less inclined to recognise it as a system of law, or to give it our respect. Thus, law has an
internal morality that goes beyond the social rules by which valid laws are made. Fuller
and Hart were colleagues at Oxford University. One of the disagreements between Fuller, a
natural lawyer, and Hart, a positivist, was whether Nazi law was so bad that it could no
longer be considered law.
John Finnis
Sophisticated positivist and natural law theories sometimes resemble each other more than
the above descriptions might suggest, and they may concede certain points to the other
"side". Identifying a particular theorist as a positivist or a natural law theorist sometimes
involves matters of emphasis and degree, and the particular influences on the theorist's work.
In particular, the older natural lawyers, such as Aquinas and John Locke made no distinction
between analytic and normative jurisprudence. But modern natural lawyers, such as John
Finnis claim to be positivists, while still arguing that law is a basically moral creature.

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Analytic jurisprudence
Analytic, or 'clarificatory' jurisprudence is using a neutral point of view and descriptive
language when referring to the aspects of legal systems. This was a philosophical
development that rejected natural law's fusing of what law is and what it ought to be. David
Hume famously argued in A Treatise of Human Nature that people invariably slip between
describing that the world is a certain way to saying therefore we ought to conclude on a
particular course of action.10 But as a matter of pure logic, one cannot conclude that we ought
to do something merely because something is the case. So analysing and clarifying the way
the world is must be treated as a strictly separate question to normative and evaluative ought
questions.
The most important questions of analytic jurisprudence are: "What are laws?"; "What is the
law?"; "What is the relationship between law and power/sociology?"; and, "What is the
relationship between law and morality?" Legal positivism is the dominant theory, although
there are a growing number of critics, who offer their own interpretations.
Legal positivists
Positivism simply means that the law is something that is "posited": laws are validly made in
accordance with socially accepted rules. The positivist view on law can be seen to cover two
broad principles: Firstly, that laws may seek to enforce justice, morality, or any other
normative end, but their success or failure in doing so does not determine their validity.
Provided a law is properly formed, in accordance with the rules recognized in the society
concerned, it is a valid law, regardless of whether it is just by some other standard. Secondly,
that law is nothing more than a set of rules to provide order and governance of society. No
legal positivist, however, argues that it follows that the law is therefore to be obeyed, no
matter what. This is seen as a separate question entirely.

What the law is - is determined by social facts (or "sources')

What obedience the law is owed - is determined by moral considerations.

Bentham and Austin

One of the earliest legal positivists was Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was an early and staunch
supporter of the utilitarian concept (along with Hume), an avid prison reformer, advocate
for democracy, and strongly atheist. Bentham's views about law and jurisprudence were
popularized by his student, John Austin. Austin was the first chair of law at the new
University of London from 1829. Austin's utilitarian answer to "what is law?" was that law is
10 http://www.suu.edu/faculty/franklinc/analyticjuris.txt (Retrieved on 24/10/2013).
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"commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a habit of
obedience". Contemporary legal positivists have long abandoned this view, and have
criticised its oversimplification, H.L.A. Hart particularly.
Hans Kelsen
Hans Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century. He is most
influential in Europe, where his notion of a Grundnorm or a "presupposed" ultimate and basic
legal norm, still retains some influence.11 It is a hypothetical norm on which all subsequent
levels of a legal system such as constitutional law and "simple" law are based. Kelsen's pure
theory of law described the law as being a set of social facts, which are normatively binding
too. Law's normativity, meaning that we must obey it, derives from a basic rule which sits
outside the law we can alter. It is a rule proscribing the validity of all others.
Kelsen was a Professor around Europe, notably the University of Vienna. In 1940, he moved
to the United States, giving the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law
School in 1942 and becoming a full professor at the department of political science at
the University of California, Berkeley in 1945. During those years, he increasingly dealt with
issues of international law and international institutions such as theUnited Nations.
H.L.A. Hart
In the Anglophone world, the pivotal writer was H.L.A. Hart, who argued that the law should
be understood as a system of social rules. Hart rejected Kelsen's views that sanctions were
essential to law and that a normative social phenomenon, like law, can not be grounded in
non-normative social facts. Hart really revived analytical jurisprudence as an important
theoretical debate in the twentieth century through his bookThe Concept of Law. As the chair
of jurisprudence at Oxford University, Hart argued law is a 'system of rules'.
Rules, said Hart, are divided into primary rules (rules of conduct) and secondary rules (rules
addressed to officials to administer primary rules). Secondary rules are divided into rules of
adjudication (to resolve legal disputes), rules of change (allowing laws to be varied) and the
rule of recognition (allowing laws to be identified as valid). The "rule of recognition", a
customary practice of the officials (especially judges) that identifies certain acts and
decisions as sources of law. A pivotal book on Hart was written by Neil
MacCormickhttp://www.law.ed.ac.uk/staff/neilmaccormick_51.aspx in 1981 (second edition
due in 2007), which further refined and offered some important criticisms that led
MacCormick to develop his own theory (the best example of which is his recently published
11 http://legalpoint.blogspot.in/2007/11/hans-kelsen.html (Retrieved on 24/10/2013).
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Institutions of Law, 2007). Other important critiques have included that of Ronald
Dworkin, John Finnis, and Joseph Raz.
In recent years, debates about the nature of law have become increasingly fine-grained. One
important debate is within legal positivism. One school is sometimes called exclusive legal
positivism, and it is associated with the view that the legal validity of a norm can never
depend on its moral correctness. A second school is labeled inclusive legal positivism, and it
is associated with the view that moral considerations may determine the legal validity of a
norm, but that it is not necessary that this is the case.
Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin is a leading philosopher. In his book 'Law's Empire' Dworkin attacked Hart
and the positivists for their refusal to treat law as a moral issue. Dworkin argues that law is an
'interpretive' concept that requires judges to find the best fitting and most just solution to a
legal dispute, given their constitutional traditions. According to him, law is not entirely based
on social facts, but includes the morally best justification for the institutional facts and
practices that we intuitively regard as legal. It follows on Dworkin's view that one cannot
know whether a society has a legal system in force, or what any of its laws are, until one
knows some moral truths about the justifications for the practices in that society. It is
consistent with Dworkin's view- in contrast with the views of legal positivists or legal
realists--that no one in a society may know what its laws are (because no one may know the
best justification for its practices.)
Interpretation, according to Dworkin's law as integrity theory, has two dimensions. To count
as an interpretation, the reading of a text must meet the criterion of fit. But of those
interpretations that fit, Dworkin maintains that the correct interpretation is the one that puts
the political practices of the community in their best light, or makes of them the best that they
can be. But many writers have doubted whether there is a single best justification for the
complex practices of any given community, and others have doubted whether, even if there
are, they should be counted as part of the law of that community.
Legal realism
Legal realism was a view popular with some Scandinavian and American writers. Skeptical
in tone, it held that the law should be understood and determined by the actual practices of
courts, law offices, and police stations, rather than as the rules and doctrines set forth in
statutes or learned treatises. It had some affinities with the sociology of law. The essential
tenet of legal realism is that all law is made by human beings and, thus, is subject to human
foibles, frailties and imperfections.
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It has become quite common today to identify Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as the main
precursor of American Legal Realism (other influences include Roscoe Pound, Karl
Llewellyn and Justice Benjamin Cardozo). Karl Llewellyn, another founder of the U.S. legal
realism movement, similarly believed that the law is little more than putty in the hands of a
judge who is able to shape the outcome of a case based on personal biases. The chief
inspiration for Scandinavian legal realism many consider to be the works of Axel
Hgerstrm. Despite its decline in facial popularity, realists continue to influence a wide
spectrum of jurisprudential schools today, including critical legal studies (scholars such
as Duncan Kennedy and Roberto Unger), feminist legal theory, critical race theory, and law
and economics.
The Historical School
Historical jurisprudence came to prominence during the German debate over the proposed
codification of German law. In his book On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and
Jurisprudence, Friedrich Carl von Savigny argued that Germany did not have a legal
language that would support codification because the traditions, customs and beliefs of the
German people did not include a belief in a code. The Historicists believe that the law
originates with society.
Normative jurisprudence
In addition to the question, "What is law?", legal philosophy is also concerned with
normative, or "evaluative" theories of law. What is the goal or purpose of law? What moral or
political theories provide a foundation for the law? What is the proper function of law? What
sorts of acts should be subject to punishment, and what sorts of punishment should be
permitted? What is justice? What rights do we have? Is there a duty to obey the law? What
value has the rule of law? Some of the different schools and leading thinkers are as follows.
Virtue jurisprudence
Aretaic moral theories such as contemporary virtue ethics emphasize the role of character in
morality. Virtue jurisprudence is the view that the laws should promote the development of
virtuous characters by citizens. Historically, this approach is associated mainly
with Aristotle orThomas Aquinas later. Contemporary virtue jurisprudence is inspired by
philosophical work on virtue ethics.
Deontology
Deontology is "the theory of duty or moral obligation." The philosopherImmanuel
Kant formulated one influential deontological theory of law. He believed that morality is that

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which if one person does, would also be good for everyone to do. A contemporary
deontological approach can be found in the work of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the view that the laws should be crafted so as to produce the best
consequences. Historically, utilitarian thinking about law is associated with the great
philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill was a pupil of Bentham's and was the torch
bearer forutilitarian philosophy through the late nineteenth century. In contemporary legal
theory, the utilitarian approach is frequently championed by scholars who work in the law
and economics tradition.
John Rawls
John Rawls was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard
University and author of A Theory of Justice(1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness:
A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. He is widely considered one of the most important
English-language political philosophers of the 20th century. His theory of justice uses a
device called the original position to ask us which principles of justice we would choose to
regulate the basic institutions of our society if we were behind a `veil of ignorance.' Imagine
we do not know who we are - our race, sex, wealth status, class, or any distinguishing feature
- so that we would not be biased in our own favour. Rawls argues from this 'original position'
that we would choose exactly the same political liberties for everyone, like freedom of
speech, the right to vote and so on. Also, we would choose a system where there is only
inequality because that produces incentives enough for the economic well-being of all
society, especially the poorest. This is Rawls' famous 'difference principle'. Justice is fairness,
in the sense that the fairness of the original position of choice guarantees the fairness of the
principles chosen in that position.
There are many other normative approaches to the philosophy of law, including critical legal
studies and libertarian theories of law.

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DEFINING JURISPRUDENCE
A number of definitions of jurisprudence have been given by various jurists taking into
consideration one facet of it or the other. The Roman Jurist, Ulpian, defined Jurisprudence as
"The observation of things human and dive, the knowledge of just and unjust."
Salmond defines Jurisprudence as the "Science of the first principles of civil law". In
Salmond's point of view, Jurisprudence thus deals with civil law or the law of the state. This
kind of law consists of rules applied by courts in the administration of justice.
Austin defines Jurisprudence as the "Philosophy of Positive Law". Positive Law means the
law laid down by political superior to regulate the conduct of those subjects in his
authority. The positive law is identical to civil law. However, the term Philosophy is
misleading. Philosophy is the theory of things, man and divine, while Jurisprudence only
deals with man-made law.
Holland defines Jurisprudence as "The Formal Science of Positive Law". He says
"Jurisprudence deals with the human relations which are governed by rules of law rather than
with the material rules themselves." Formal science differs from material science in the way
that formal science deals with fundamental principles underlying and not concrete details.
According to the realists, law is what courts do, not what they say. Since law is defined in
terms of official action, it follows that any force that will influence a judge in reaching a
decision is a fit subject for jurisprudence.12
Therefore, there are a number of definitions to jurisprudence. Kelsen, in his pure science,
would divorce jurisprudence from ethics and sociology. Pound would study law in action and
the sociologist would turn to a science of society itself. The teleological school plumb the
depths of metaphysics to discover absolute values on which to build. Jurisprudence attempts
to discover as much as possible concerning legal method to study the concepts of the law, and

12 G.N. Garland, Legal Realism and Justice [London: Oxford University Press, 1941] at p. 135.
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trace the influence of the social forces upon their development. It is the functional study of
the concepts which legal systems develop, and of the social interests which law protects.
Karl Llewellyn says Jurisprudence is as big as law, bigger. Therefore, it is very difficult to
define Jurisprudence or to give a universal definition of it. To quote Dias who says the
answer to what jurisprudence is whatever anybody intends it to mean. It includes political,
social, economic and cultural ideas.

CONCLUSION
In modern studies Jurisprudence is both the branch of humanist sciences that studies the law
and the complex of legal principles. Jurisprudence refers to two different things. First,
in common law jurisdictions, it means simply "case law", i.e. the law that is established
through the decisions of the courts and other officials. Second, it means the philosophy of
law, or legal theory, which studies not what the law is in a particular jurisdiction (say, Turkey
or the United States) but law in general--i.e. those attributes common to all legal systems.
Jurisprudence in the second sense is conventionally divided into two parts: descriptive, or
analytic, jurisprudence, and normative jurisprudence. Analytic jurisprudence studies what law
'is', normative jurisprudence studies what law 'ought to be'.
Each school of jurisprudence is not a self-contained body of thought. The lines separating
positivism from realism and natural law from formalism often become blurry. The legal
philosophy of Justice Holmes, for example, borrowed from the realist, positivist, pragmatic,
and historical strains of thought.
In this regard, some scholars have observed that it is more appropriate to think of
jurisprudence as a spectrum of legal thought, where the nuances of one thinker delicately
blend with those of the next. For example, Harold Berman, a leading authority on
comparative Legal History, has advocated the development of an integrative jurisprudence,
which would assimilate into one philosophy the insights from each school of legal theory.
The staying power of any body of legal thought, Berman has suggested, lies not in its name
but in its ability to explain the enterprise of law.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS & ARTICLES
1. Amos Sheldon, A Systematic View of the Science of Jurisprudence, London:
Longmans Green & Co., 2005.
2. Hassan, M Kabir, Mervyn K. Lewis, Handbook of Islamic Banking, U.S.A: Elgar
Original Reference, 2006.
3. Maine Sir Henry Sumner James, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the History of
Early Society.
4. 42 Juridical. Review 275 1930.
WEBSITES
1. www.suu.edu/faculty/franklinc/analyticjuris.txt.
2. neohumanism.org/j/ju/jurisprudence.html.
3. http://www.academia.edu/4408954/School_of_Laws_in_Modern_Western_Law.
4. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php
%3Ftitle=2081&chapter=158278&layout=html&Itemid=27,

John

Frost

Dillon,

Benthams Influences in the Reforms of the Nineteenth Century, The Online Library of
Liberty.
5. legalpoint.blogspot.in/2007/11/hans-kelsen.html.

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